I watched Mohawk, a historical supernatural movie set in colonial New York, and featuring Indigenous protagonists. The movie follows a Haudenosaunee Mohawk man and woman and their English lover as they try to escape from a sadistic band of American soldiers hunting them through forested Iroquoia. Given that plot, it would be easy for this movie to get b-movie silly, but the director, Ted Geoghegan, frequently slowed things down and lingers over faces, trees, and landscapes, giving the movie an almost dream-like and contemplative quality. There is a supernatural and horrific element, but the real horror is colonialism, and the violence that it required and requires. The production design suggests a low budget, but within those constraints it was really well made and well acted, especially its Haudenosaunee/Iroquois and other Indigenousactors. The script was co-written by none other than Grady Hendrix, author of Horrorstor (a horror novel designed like an Ikea catalog) and My Best Friend's Exorcism, both of which are wonderful and worth your time.

I tried (and mostly failed) not to watch the slow moving car-wreck of American jurisprudence.

I watched The Endless, a strange and creepy movie from the makers of Resolution, another strange and creepy movie. The basic plot is that two brothers who escaped from a UFO death cult when they were teenagers discover that the cult's compound and membership are still alive and active. They decide to visit, partly out of boredome and dissatisfaction with their new lives, and partly out of curiousity as to why everyone is still where they left them. The gradual and ultimately only partial unveiling of the mystery, makes this the kind of ambiguous, well-made sci-fi horror movie that is both really exciting to me, and exceedingly rare.

By contrast, there is something distinct about social sadism in modern capitalism, and in neoliberalism in particular. This is surplus cruelty in a specific sense, sadism supererogatory in relation to the – conjunctural, contested – ‘functional’ requirements of the system, a social formation characterised by the hedged, reversible, embattled but well-documented historical shift away from social punishment as overt – the qualification is crucial – spectacular, sanctioned, performative cruelty.

and perhaps more ambiguously, but hopefully

We build against sadism. We build to experience the joy of its every fleeting defeat. Hoping for more joy, for longer, each time, longer and stronger; until, perhaps, we hope, for yet more; and you can’t say it won’t ever happen, that the ground won’t shift, that it won’t one day be the sadisms that are embattled, the sadisms that are fleeting, on a new substratum of something else, newly foundational, that the sadisms won’t diminish or be defeated, that those for whom they are machinery of rule won’t be done.